A large percentage of the workforce are employed in ‘knowledge’ jobs, cognitively demanding jobs such as IT engineers, academics, and accountants. These jobs are known to be stressful for the workers, however, job redesign is challenging. Over 14 months, a participative organizational-level health intervention was evaluated across six organizations in Denmark. The intervention was designed to improve working conditions and psychological well-being of knowledge workers. Who conducted the study? Ole Henning Sørensen of the Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark at the…

Who conducted the study? This study was conducted by Nathanael J. Fast (Department of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California) and Serena Chen (Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley). What did they find? Four studies demonstrated that power holders become aggressive when they sense a lack of self-perceived competence. They found that aggression seems to be driven by an internal state of ego defensiveness. Study 1 They found that high self-perceived incompetence was associated…

The purpose of this study was to see how traumatic workplace stressors of firefighters impact their cognitive, affective and behavioral outcomes. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), burnout, and absenteeism were the specific outcomes investigated. The researchers sought to determine if humor is an effective coping mechanism. PTSD is a mental health condition triggered by experiencing or seeing a terrifying event and includes cognitive and behavioral outcomes such as the re-experiencing of the trauma, avoidance, and anxiety. Burnout involves a state of…

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The Blog at CHART Lab is curated and maintained by students with the guidance of faculty oversight. It is an initiative to summarize recent scientific findings and briefly describe why such findings are relevant to employees and business leaders.

Our team is trained in the scientist-practitioner tradition. Therefore we work to connect cutting edge science with business practice.

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